The taste for chronograms has continued to this day, but in time the arithmetic of the reader was helped out by an incidental date. The earliest numerals I have found are of the time of Süleïman the Magnificent, on a fountain built by a Jew in the suburb of Hass-kyöi (931, 1525). The same fountain is also decorated with the earliest reliefs I have noted, consisting merely of a little tracery on the mirror stone. Altogether this period was an important one for fountains as it was for all Turkish architecture. But while a few of them are admirably proportioned, like the little fountain in Avret Bazaar at the gate of the soup-kitchen of the _Hasseki_—she was Hourrem, the Joyous One, who bore to Süleïman his ill-fated son Moustafa—many of them are disappointingly heavy. It may be that the great Sinan did not consider such small monuments worth his while, or that they have suffered by restoration. At all events, the lesser sultans who followed Süleïman left fountains generally more graceful. Ahmed I is said to have built not less than a hundred of them. In the meantime they gradually developed in detail. The tracery, less floral than geometrical, covered more and more of the marble. Conventionalised cypresses, with tops mysteriously bent, sprang up on either side of the taps. Conventionalised roses, often having a mystic symbolism, became a favourite ornament for the apex of the arch. The occult pentagram or hexagram, symbolic of microcosm and macrocosm and talismanic against evil, were sometimes carved at the corners. And the top, when it was not shaded by broad eaves, was finished in various decorative ways. The golden age of street fountains was in the first half of the eighteenth century, during the reigns of those notable builders Ahmed III and his nephew Mahmoud I. The change which they introduced into the architecture of their country was in many ways an unhappy one. It led the Turks out of their own order of tradition, which is rarely a safe or useful thing to do, into strange byways of bad taste where they lost themselves for two hundred years. Still, an architecture that tries experiments is an architecture that lives, and at its beginning the Turkish rococo has an inimitable grace and spirit. The fountains of the period are decorated, as no fountains had been decorated before, with floral reliefs a little like those of the Renaissance tombs and with fruits and flowers in various quaint receptacles. The earlier of the garden _selsebils_ I have already mentioned is an example, and a more typical one is the wall fountain of the Valideh Jedid in Scutari. The sculptures also began to be touched up with colour and gilding, as in the larger of the two fountains of Ak Bîyîk. So must have been the charming fountain, now most lamentably neglected, on the street that drops from Galata Tower to Pershembeh Bazaar. [Illustration: Street fountain at Et Yemez]